Web 2.0 is just a popularity contest

Jaron Lanier, the Original Virtual Realist (respect!) writing on the TED conference, makes an interesting point about how technology is shifting as it becomes more established:

When the conference began in the 1980s, nerds were on the rise. Brilliant young innovators, often shunned at high school, were making millions with computers. But now the tables have turned, with a new crop of Web 2.0 businesses—Twitter, Facebook and so on—all run by handsome, pleasant, popular guys. Their projects—mostly about small improvements in user experience—require little technological prowess. They certainly don’t make money. They are the business equivalents of popularity contests, in which entrepreneurs get rich by selling the large audiences that they have attracted to older nerds at Google and Microsoft, who hope that someday a business model may appear.

Or as Andrew Orlowski once remarked, "presentation layer people trying to solve Infrastructure layer problems".

The lesson to take away is that, in this cycle anyway, the hard architectural problems have been solved to a "good enough" degree, now its about making them easier to use etc. Its like post war cars - once it was sorted out how they worked, where to put the pedals etc, it became largely a styling game for quite a while.

The thing I noticed at TED was the huge number that were "not for profit" startups, and wondered if that was a new trend - or, if its just a clearing market for these as a result of a TED subculture where, as Lanier notes:

What was once an intimate gathering of artists and scientists in an out-of-the way part of California has become an extroverted celebration, in Los Angeles, where intellectuals entertain and court philanthropists—something of a laboratory for post-capitalist motivational psychology.

Or is it simply that there is bugger all money in the VC's now, and less scrutiny in Not for Profits?